• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle






  • Meh. I got one for free from a job’s tech allowance, and it’s never really a problem. It charges fast and the OS warns you early enough to plug it in on a lunch break or at the end of the day well before it runs out. Not ideal but def not garbage. Honestly, I get more frustrated with noise canceling headphones and keyboards dying at inconvenient times than I ever do the mouse.

    I dont use it daily, but it is a pretty good mouse for my laptop bag. Charge holds a long time for once/week use. If it’s dead when I get to the coffee shop or wherever I’m working, itll be usable in 15 mins or less anyway. It also works nicely with Linux out of the box, which is a rarity among Bluetooth mice (in my experience).

    The other elephant in the room: not having multitasking gestures on a mouse when using macOS is a serious drawback for any other mouse out there, so there is a reason people are willing to put up with the annoyance (if they ever get annoyed in the first place)


  • I was a roku fan for s long time until they really enshittified (which sucks, since their UI overall is superior and their products are supported for a really, really long time)

    I dont see moving away from android any time soon, and i’m not quite ready/willing to take the plunge into alternate ROM’s (the pixel festures are really nice!) so I figure google TV at least isnt going to learn much about me that google doesnt already know. The newer OS iteration isnt that bad a UI, either.

    I do think all this will motivate me to get a kodi device set up and use the smart TV stuff a lot less, though, and I dont think I’ll be in a rush to replace my existing roku TV’s/boxes for secondary room use. I can tell they have a bit of targeted ads, but it mostly seems based on content I watch on the TV itself. Probably helps that most of my online life on home-based internet usage is very filtered of tracking through my router, though i haven’t put a ton of effort into blocking roku specifically.


  • I’m in a swing state with an abortion measure on the ballot, and while all the polls claim it’s close, I’m not really sure they are properly accounting for the number of voters that have been activated by the possibility of enshrining pro-choice into the state constitution.

    These polling strategies are complex and a lot of thought goes into them, but they rarely can account for uncommon circumstances that increase voter turnout in local or state elections and how that will effect the national election.

    While this is entirely personal reexperience bias, I also wonder how effective these polls are at reaching a representative survey group. I know at least on my phone basically all survey calls and texts go to spam and I wonder if older, more conservative voters are getting overrepresented due to their likelihood of not having those kinds of spam filters in place.




  • As a side note, if you work somewhere that uses 1password, you can usually get your personal subscription comped as an individual. Only need to pay for it if you leave your company or they drop 1password.

    I dont know that I’ll stay on 1password forever, but on the scale of things I’m most concerned about self-hosting vs using a reasonably private SaaS, 1password is nowhere near the top of my list to ditch. Otherwise, its a solid recommendation for non-self hosters who want to make some progress.







  • The central point of that article is certinally valid. Something that was worked on for a while with broad congressional support and public support getting vetoed isnt ideal for a democratic process. No resolution on issues is not a good thing since another 3-6-12 months of no regulation for a theoretically netter bill to work through the system will allow for continued abuse by AI behemoths. Newsom is a corpo dem, so idk what people expected, anyway.

    I don’t buy into the AGI FUD. These are word calculators. But these tools are being hooked up to all sorts of things they shouldn’t be hooked up to and the lack of broad privacy regulation in the US puts LLM usage that handles sensitive data and/or decisions firmly into dangerous territory. Business decisions made by irresponsible management with no regard for data privacy or human safety are already a massive problem that actively cause harm, and hooking current AI tools onto these processes only seems to make the problems worse, especially while AI usage is in this gray space where no one wants to take responsibility for the outcomes.



  • Personal experience bias in mind: I feel like owners and managers are less interested in resolving tech debt now vs even 5 years ago… Business owners want to grow sales and customer base, they don’t want to hear about how the bad decisions made 3 years ago are making us slow, or how the short-term solution we compromised on last month means we can’t just magically scale the product tomorrow. They also don’t want to give us time to resolve those problems in order to move fast. It becomes a double-edged sword, and they try to use the “oh well when we hit this milestone we can hire more people to solve the tech debt”… But it doesn’t really work that way.

    Its also possible I’m more sensitive to the problem now that I’m in them lead/principal roles rather than senior roles. I put my foot down on tech debt a lot, but sometimes I can’t. Its a vicious cycle and it’ll only get worse the longer the tech sector is stuck in this investor-fueled forever-growth mindset.

    Too much “move fast and break things” from non-technical people, not enough “let’s build a solid foundation now to reap rewards later”. Its a prioritization of short term profits. And that means we, the engineers, often get stuck holding the bag of problems to solve. And if you care about your work, it becomes a point of frustration even if you try to view the job as just a job.